The Healers Page 6

  Hunter had been expecting quite a different sort of woman, someone blowsy and sexy, like his favourite barmaid, but even he was moved. Almost to tears. Christ, he thought, I must be getting soft in my old age.

  She went on matter-of-factly: ‘When Russel left I knew I’d have to get a job of some sort. To support myself. His new wife very soon had a baby and I couldn’t expect him to give me money when they had financial commitments of their own. But I wasn’t qualified for anything and I’d lost any self-esteem I’d had with the divorce. So I went for shop work. I didn’t think that would be too demanding. I got taken on by Hawkins.’ Ramsay nodded. He recognized the name. Hawkins was an old-fashioned, family-run department store. ‘I enjoyed it. I progressed through the business and became a supervisor. Then I was approached by Mr Jones who has the shoe shop in the square. He wanted to retire and he needed a manager. He thought I’d do. It was rather flattering to be asked. And the money was good. A commission on top of the salary. I built up the business and did rather well.’ She paused again. ‘ I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘None of this is relevant to your enquiry. I’m afraid I’m wasting your time. But I’m trying to explain how I went to the agency.’

  ‘The work had given you confidence,’ Ramsay said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, pleased that he knew what she meant ‘And I thought: if I can be quite successful in work, why not in my private life? It wasn’t so much that I felt lonely. But incomplete. I don’t suppose you understand…’

  Ramsay understood very well.

  ‘I never met men,’ she explained. ‘Except in the shop and that was no good. I tried the usual things – evening classes, clubs. That got me out of the house but I only met other women, or occasionally a happily married man. I had the feeling that time was running out. It sounds awful but I thought: soon I’ll be in competition not only with spinsters and divorcees but with widows too. I suppose I was getting desperate.’

  ‘So you decided to try a more direct approach?’

  She nodded. ‘ One of my regular customers had been to the agency. She didn’t hide it. She even turned it into a joke. And suddenly she seemed so well and alive. She’d met such a nice man, older than her, a retired bank clerk, a widower.’

  She stopped short. ‘I’m losing track,’ she said. ‘You don’t want to hear all this. I don’t very often have the opportunity to talk about myself’

  ‘Go on,’ Ramsay said. ‘We’re in no hurry.’

  Speak for yourself, Hunter thought. He wanted his tea and a few pints before closing time.

  ‘So I plucked up courage and thought: why not? Why not give it a go at least? To see if I could find someone nice like my customer. Perhaps it sounds ridiculous at my age but I wanted that excitement, you know, of falling in love. Just once more.’

  ‘You went to the agency in person?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I made a telephone appointment first and then I went. I’d been expecting an office, something official, but it was run by a young woman, a young mother actually who couldn’t get out to work, from her own home.’

  ‘And she introduced you to Mr Bowles?’

  ‘Not directly. She showed me a file of application forms. I read through them and chose three, put them in order of preference. Mr Bowles was my first choice.’ Her voice was flat.

  ‘Had the manager of the agency met him?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I don’t think she can have done.’ She shivered slightly. ‘She seemed a very honest woman. I don’t think she would have recommended him if she’d met him.’

  Ramsay let that go. They would come to Mrs Symons’s meeting with Ernie Bowles in time.

  ‘Were you the first woman to be introduced to Mr Bowles?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I rather think I was.’

  ‘What was it about Mr Bowles’s application form which led you to choose him?’

  She paused, considered. ‘ To be honest I expect it was wishful thinking,’ she said. ‘The form wasn’t very well written, you know, and at the time I even saw that in a positive light. Russel, my husband, had always been very superior about his education. It was the farming, I suppose, which attracted me, and the fact that he’d never been married. I’ve always been a fan of Thomas Hardy and I imagined Mr Bowles as one of his heroes: uneducated perhaps and shy, but close to nature, gentle.’

  ‘And Mr Bowles didn’t live up to those expectations?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But to be honest no one would. I see that now.’

  ‘How did you arrange to meet?’

  ‘The agency gave him my telephone number. He phoned me up.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘At the beginning of the week. Monday morning.’

  ‘You weren’t put off by his phone call?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘He sounded a little… rough, but I’d expected that. I’ve never been a snob, Inspector.’

  Hardy again, Ramsay thought. Hunter, who’d never heard of Thomas Hardy, thought she’d been turned on by the idea of doing it with one of the working class.

  ‘Tell me about Saturday night,’ Ramsay said. ‘ What happened?’

  ‘We arranged to meet in the lounge of the Ship. He said he would buy me dinner.’

  ‘He was there when you got there?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He may have been there for some time. He’d certainly had a couple of drinks.’

  ‘He was drunk?’

  ‘No. Not really drunk.’

  ‘Could you give me your first impressions of him?’

  She hesitated, surprised by the question.

  ‘He was short, thick-set. He’d obviously made some effort to get ready to meet me but it hadn’t quite come off. I suppose I should have found that touching.’

  ‘But you didn’t?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m finding this hard to explain, Inspector, but there was something about him which disturbed me. Nothing concrete. A way of looking at me. Perhaps that’s it.’

  ‘One witness has described him as “ creepy”,’ Ramsay said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said gratefully. ‘That’s just it. I thought I was overreacting.’ She gave a sudden smile, self-mocking. ‘ But I don’t think I lived up to his expectations either. We were both disappointed.’

  ‘Yet you went through with the dinner?’

  ‘I wasn’t sure how to get out of it. He was quite insistent and I didn’t want to make a scene. I might not have been the sort of woman he imagined but I had the impression that he considered me better than nothing. I really think he believed I was grateful for his attentions.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘We ordered a meal,’ she said. ‘I tried to talk to him, find out about his life on the farm. I thought that would be safe ground.’

  ‘What did he say about the farm?’

  ‘It was rather a litany of complaint. About how much work there was for one man, how little money it brought in, how lonely he was. I stopped being frightened of him then. He just seemed very pathetic. That’s when I decided to leave. I told him I had to go to the ladies’ cloakroom and walked out through the back door. I suppose it was a very cowardly thing to do, just to leave him sitting there. And rather unkind. But I didn’t want to spend any more time with him, and I didn’t see why I should.’

  The words were defiant. It would have come hard to her to walk out, Ramsay thought, after years of always doing the decent thing.

  ‘I stood in the backyard of the Ship with all the empty barrels and I burst into tears. It wasn’t so much that Mr Bowles had upset me. It was disappointment, I suppose. Injured pride.’

  ‘Did anyone see you there?’ Ramsay asked.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Did anyone see you in the yard?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘ The kitchen’s at the back of the hotel. Perhaps one of the staff would have seen me. Why?’

  ‘You were one of the last people to see Mr Bowles alive,’ Ramsay said gently. ‘You do see that we have to
corroborate your story.’

  ‘Oh yes! Of course. I should have realized.’ She thought again. ‘When I pulled myself together I walked round the side of the hotel and into the street. I met Mr Jones there, my boss. He asked me if I was all right. I suppose I looked upset. I said I was fine but I let him walk me to my car. I thought Mr Bowles might come chasing after me.’

  ‘But he didn’t? You never saw him again?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘During the time you spent with Mr Bowles did he mention that he’d arranged to meet anyone else later that evening?’

  ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘ Definitely not.’ She blushed a deeper shade of scarlet. ‘ I had the impression, you see, that he’d expected to spend the night with me.’

  ‘Did he talk about friends, business acquaintances? Anyone he’d had a row with?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘There was nothing like that.’

  ‘What about his tenants? Sean and Lily. Did he mention them?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Well, what did he talk about?’ Hunter demanded, losing patience. ‘Apart from the farm.’

  ‘His mother,’ she said. ‘He talked about his mother.’

  ‘What did he say about her?’

  ‘Nothing really. Nothing specific. He just wanted to talk about her. For me to know how important she’d been to him. I think that was it.’

  They stood for a moment on the pavement. It was dusk. In the little house Jane Symons turned on the light and drew the curtains.

  ‘That doesn’t get us much further forward then, does it?’ Hunter said. He was disappointed, felt the interview had been an anticlimax. Then he reconsidered, brightened. ‘If anything it points more to Slater. We know now that Bowles went home alone.’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Ramsay said. ‘We know he was alone when Mrs Symons left him. That’s all.’

  Ernie Bowles would have been furious, Ramsay thought. And frustrated. He’d made all that effort, only to be stood up. What would he have done to try and mend his hurt pride? Find another woman, surely. And the fact that he’d arrived at the farm at ten o’clock made it seem that he’d found one quickly.

  ‘Tomorrow I want all the pubs in Otterbridge checked,’ Ramsay said. ‘Especially the ones where women hang out on their own. And in Mittingford. He might have gone back there when he was stood up. Find out if anyone saw the Land-Rover. And I want to know if anyone was hitch-hiking along the road he’d have taken. He might have picked someone up.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Hunter said. ‘OK.’

  Ramsay had been expecting some complaint. Hunter hated that sort of routine checking. But he seemed hardly to have been listening.

  Hunter had found himself suddenly thinking of Lily Jackman, and how it wouldn’t be so bad coming back to a place like this, a little house in a suburban street, if she were there, waiting for him.

  Chapter Nine

  On their way back to Mittingford. Ramsay and Hunter drove past the Otterbridge College of Further Education. When it was opened in 1967 the college had won an award for its design, now it had degenerated into shabbiness. The concrete was stained with damp and the paint was peeling. Hunter regarded the place with affection. It always evoked a twinge of nostalgia. He had hated school and left as soon as he could, then went on to the college to re-sit O Levels and try for an A Level in Technical Drawing. Which he had just scraped through. While he was a student there he had passed his driving test. His mother, somehow, had found the money to buy an old Escort and in the back of the car he had made his first sexual conquests.

  That was fifteen years ago, he realized, and he wondered, as he had on the pavement at Orchard Park, whether it might be time for him to think of settling down. The interview with Jane Symons had made him uncharacteristically uneasy. To be that desperate! he thought. That old and that desperate. What if I’m like that in fifteen years time, left with the feeling that I’ve missed the boat? For some reason the girl in the caravan had got under his skin. He couldn’t forget her.

  Deliberately, he pushed the thought away, and went on to consider the chances of getting Sally Wedderburn into bed. He’d always fancied redheads and he’d had his eye on Sally for months. She’d been going out with some slob in the serious crime squad and he’d even heard rumours of an engagement, but he’d always liked a challenge. In the hot-house atmosphere of a murder investigation, he thought, with everyone living away from home, drinking too much to relieve the stress of the day’s disappointments or to celebrate small victories, in that atmosphere anything was possible.

  Val McDougal would have liked to go to the acupuncture lecture in the college. Magda had announced it during the group and asked them all to give their support. Val would have done almost anything for Magda, but tonight she was working late. She always worked late on Mondays. She took a numeracy course for mature students recruited from a nearby industrial estate. Business and Education in partnership. That was what it was all about now. Most were women and most were conscripts sent along by a couple of personnel managers who wanted to be seen to be doing something about training. Val usually enjoyed the class but tonight she found it hard to concentrate.

  At seven-thirty they had a coffee break and trooped off to the cafeteria.

  ‘What’s wrong with you tonight then, Val?’ asked one woman, who still wore the white overall she used at work. ‘Going down with something, pet?’

  ‘Perhaps I am,’ Val said. ‘Some sort of bug.’

  ‘We don’t want you going sick on us, do we, girls? We’d miss our Monday nights. I would anyway. If school had been a bit more like this I might have done something with my life.’

  ‘You’d have been a brain surgeon, would you?’ said her friend. ‘Instead of a packer at Fullertons.’ Fullertons made toiletries for most of the big chain stores. You could always tell the women who worked there. They smelled faintly of chemicals and cheap perfume.

  ‘You never know I might and all,’ said the first woman, waiting for them all to laugh. ‘What do you think, Val? Make a good brain surgeon, would I?’

  ‘Why not?’ Val replied, although she had only been half following the conversation. They laughed again and shared round the cigarettes. They could not imagine what troubles Val might have. She lived in a big house with a husband who worked at the university and two sons you could be proud of. She didn’t get letters from the Gas Board threatening to cut off the supply or the police at her door because one of the kids had got into bother again.

  ‘Back to the grindstone then,’ Val said and led them back to the classroom on the third floor for another hour of simple fractions and decimals.

  The class finished at eight-thirty but there were always students who wanted to stay behind to chat. Usually she liked to be home by nine because there was a television programme she enjoyed watching – a thriller set in Glasgow which Charles said was trash. Tonight she was reluctant to let them go. She had things on her mind and if she were alone she would be forced to come to a decision. So far she had done nothing, but that, she thought as the last of the women clattered down the bare concrete steps, had been a decision of sorts.

  On her way to her car she walked past the lecture hall and saw that the speaker was still on his feet. She thought there’d been a good turn out but it was hard to tell. He’d been showing slides and the body of the hall was in darkness. She contemplated slipping into the back to watch the remainder of the speech – there was no one at home to go back to – but decided against it. She still found crowds intimidating.

  In the car park she hesitated. She was sure the Abbots and Magda would have attended the lecture – Daniel Abbot was giving the introduction. Perhaps she should wait and speak to them. She scanned the row of cars briefly but did not see the Abbots’ Rover or Magda’s VW. It was probably just as well, she thought. Probably they were the last people she should speak to.

  In the car she switched on the radio hoping to get some local news, but there was only pop music and she turned it off. It had been a
lousy weekend, she thought as she drove through the quiet suburban streets. Magda’s invitation to supper had been an honour, but she should have turned it down, explained that Charles always cooked on Saturdays, made some excuse. It hadn’t lived up to expectations anyway. Magda had brought up the subject of Juniper Hall again. She seemed to be probing for information. Val thought that after all this time they should let Faye Cooper rest in peace.

  Sunday had been even worse. Usually she loved Magda’s group. Charles had been in such a bad mood that she almost decided to skip it. She wished now that she’d stayed at home.

  Perhaps it’s all the lying that’s getting me down, she thought, as she approached her street. All the pretence. Because Charles knew nothing of her connection with the Alternative Therapy Centre. She could imagine the ridicule she’d be tormented with if he ever found out. Quacks or morons, he always said if he read an item about complementary medicine in the newspaper, directing the same scorn at them as he did at organized religion or the kids she taught. She could talk to James, of course, but it hardly seemed fair to burden her son with her problems, especially now when he was preparing for exams. He’d been through enough lately…

  She realized that her thoughts had been rambling and that she was home. The house was dark and empty. Charles was always back late on Monday nights. He had a meeting of sociology department staff which sometimes went on until midnight. At least that was what he told Val. She suspected that Monday was his night for Heather, his postgraduate student and occasional mistress. Val imagined them sometimes in Heather’s hall of residence bedsit, making love in a single bed while the thump of other students’ music came through the walls. She found it hard to picture Charles, so obsessive, so concerned about his privacy, performing in such circumstances, but perhaps these. Monday nights had become part of his routine, and if Heather cancelled one he would be as put out as he was with her missing dinner on Saturday.

  Usually on Monday nights James was waiting for her. Often he’d have cooked the supper and have a bottle of wine open. He never mentioned the tension between her and Charles but he knew how things stood.